


who does your past belong to today?

by kadaransmuggler



Series: seven year ache [2]
Category: Fallout (Video Games), Fallout: New Vegas
Genre: Child Abandonment, Drug Addiction, Drug Use, Family Reunion, M/M, Past Abuse, Suicidal Thoughts, Unhealthy Relationships, lost family, past abusive relationships
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-16
Updated: 2018-08-16
Packaged: 2019-06-28 10:15:10
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,644
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15705189
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kadaransmuggler/pseuds/kadaransmuggler
Summary: "When he walks out of the Freeside gate, Eli doesn't turn to look over his shoulder.He knows his feet will always lead him back."





	who does your past belong to today?

                Eli’s first memory is of hunger. Old Lady Gibbs did her best to take care of him, but in Westside there was only so much food to go around and nobody cared about the scrawny, squalling child. Gibbs sees that he doesn’t starve to death, but when he’s eight years old she up and dies on him.

                He thought he had been lonely before when there were no other kids around. Just Gibbs, who never was much for conversation. Just Gibbs, who’d stare off at the horizon sometimes with a faraway look in her eyes, like she was imagining another world and another life.

                When Gibbs is gone, though, Eli is eight years old and he learns that it is him against the world.

* * *

                In Westside, some of the old buildings are still standing, tall and proud. Eli’s skinny and quick, and by the time Gibbs dies he can climb to the top of them. Over the years, he gathers a collection of the only things he owns and keeps them on that rooftop. A tattered old baby blanket that Gibbs said he was wrapped in when she found him, never quite looking him in the eyes like she always does when she lies. A handful of shotgun shells that he found in the mouth of an alley. A length of broken chain that he’d played with when he was small.

                It is the only place he doesn’t think they’ll ever be found. When Gibbs dies, he moves the scant items she has up there, too. An old pillow, a threadbare quilt. He builds a shelter, just enough to keep him warm in the cold desert nights.

                Sometimes, when the nights are warm, Eli will drag the old threadbare quilt and the pillow out of the shelter, and he’ll lay on his back and look up at the stars. He’ll think about Gibbs, and the parents he doesn’t know, and he’ll wonder why everybody who was supposed to care left him on his own.

* * *

                Eli is fifteen when he finally leaves Westside. Strangers had come into town, with talk of trade and crops and package deliveries. He’d never walked nowhere but through the town itself, but he figures it can’t be hard to deliver a package, and he’s sick of staring up at the stars and wondering why he’s all alone.

                When he goes, he tells himself that he won’t look back. He almost makes it, too, but he turns before Westside can disappear on the horizon and takes one last long look at the place where he grew up.

                He finds that he doesn’t miss it.

* * *

                There’s a lot of growing done between fifteen and seventeen. Eli already knew about hunger, but the desert teaches him about thirst as well. He finds an old canteen and keeps it with him. He learns how to shoot, finds he likes the feeling of a revolver in his hand. He likes his shotgun, too, and he remembers the shells he kept on the roof. He turned those into a necklace.

                He hits a growth spurt, too. Gets taller than he should for a kid who went hungry his whole life, but when Eli towers above most of the people who used to look down on him, he finds he can’t complain. He gets his ears pierced, and then his lip. He starts mapping his story in tattoos, on his back, and up his arms.

                He never puts down roots. The way he sees it, there’s no point. There’s always another job for him to take, always another road that’ll lead to another city. Always more caps to be made, and at this point Eli can’t afford to turn them down. Sometimes he’ll take someone to bed with him (only once he hits seventeen, before then he may as well be the scrawny kid he was back in Westside, but when he hits his growth spurt and gets tall, there’s nobody left that’d call him a kid) and he learns the hard way that he still needs to sleep with a gun, and sleep light, or else he may wake up and everything he owns is gone.

                Eli learns not to be picky about the jobs he takes. The Mojave Express gives their best jobs to their best couriers. Nobody gives a shit about a kid from Westside with no last name, so he makes his reputation by taking the jobs that nobody else will. When he’s seventeen, a town springs up in his footsteps, and he learns how to make them care.

* * *

                It is seventeen days before his twenty-fifth birthday when he wakes up in Goodsprings. The good doctor put him back together, like all the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t have done, but there’s an itch under his skin that he hasn’t been able to shake for the past four years.

                One home in all his life, and he’d come back with wedding rings to find a pile of smoking rubble. Westside wasn’t ever a home, not to him. He hadn’t gone back since he’d left at fifteen.

                Mitchell won’t give him jet. Won’t give him med-x, either, not with the medical history Eli was stupid enough to tell him. So, he waits until the good doctor falls asleep and he takes what he wants, leaving a pile of caps behind. After the powder gangers and all the bullets he took, he figures the town owes him.

                Goodsprings is just one more place that he doesn’t look back at when he leaves.

* * *

                Eli always finds trouble, or trouble always finds him. When he finally limps into Freeside (not Westside, never Westside, he’ll die before he goes back even though that’s the place that made him) he’s got two bullets in his side and his hands are shaking because he ran out of jet three days ago. Or maybe it was because he used four syringes of med-x in one fight to make it through the Fiends, but he’d decided that they didn’t get to be the ones who put him in the ground.

                He stops long enough for a local to point him to the Old Mormon Fort, and then he makes his way there, blood seeping between his fingers. Maybe it’s time he invested in better armor, but the Eli’s used to caps being too hard to get.

                If he’s being honest, he’s just waiting for the day when a raider junkie gets lucky enough to fire a shot that’ll put him down for good. Armor would only make that harder.

                A woman with pale ginger hair and sad brown eyes doctors him up. Her eyes narrow at the tremors in his hands, her mouth thinning when he asks for jet or med-x or both if they can spare it. She gives him a dose of fixer instead and tells him he might get nauseous.

                He doesn’t know why she looks so familiar.

* * *

                He will see the woman with ginger hair five more times before he will find out who she is. Each time it’s some other gunfight that sends him to her. Thugs on the streets, the securitrons in the Lucky 38 that protected House. That last one had almost killed him, but it was worth it to see the look on Benny’s face when he runs his fingers along the keyboard of what had been House’s monitor.

                The Followers are running low on stimpaks, so she slathers a poultice on his burns and wraps bandages around them. She makes conversation about lasers and energy weapons, and Eli only gives her half-hearted grunts in response.

It’s still stinging when he steps back into Freeside, but it doesn’t bother him none. Vegas is almost his, won’t be long until it is.

                But Benny’s been getting closer to him, too, and there’s a caravan headed out to New Canaan, and Eli’s always been the type to run. Besides, he’d been in one place for too long. He needed a new horizon to walk towards until he doesn’t feel like he’s going to claw his way out of his own skin to escape. He might take Vegas, but it won’t ever be a home.

                He doesn’t make it to the Freeside gates.

* * *

                A man grabs his arm, and Eli turns to put a bullet in his brain, but his eyes meet the man’s and he finds that it’s like staring into a mirror.

                The same dark brown hair, the same nose, the same chin, and the same jaw. The man’s got a few more wrinkles and different scars, and that’s all there is that tells him this ain’t some hallucination brought on by passing something reflective.

                The man seems to have the same realization, reeling back, pulling his hand to his chest like he’d been burned. Eli can see old ghosts in his eyes.

                They stare at each other for a long heartbeat, and Eli puts his gun back in the holster. With a painful rawness, he feels like the kid back in Westside, staring up at the stars and wondering why he was alone.

                The man’s hands shake with the same tremors Eli gets when he goes too long without his chems. Was that something he’d inherited too, then? He wants to run, wants to back up and run to New Canaan and never come back, forget Vegas and Benny and the Divide. Ain’t no sense in staying where he was never wanted and he doesn’t know why it’s only now that he’s realized it.

                He takes the man’s arm, instead, pulls it over his shoulder and drags him back to the Mormon Fort. They’d been out of stimpaks, but they still had plenty of Fixer, last he heard.

                “Why are you helping me?” the man grinds out, and maybe it rankles his pride or maybe he’s afraid too.

                “You tell me,” Eli grunts, only for the man to stop dead, eyes wide. The courier follows his line of sight to the woman who’d tended his wounds. She hasn’t noticed them yet, talking to a patient with a smile on her face, but the man he’d dragged here sure as hell noticed her.

                He stumbles toward her before Eli can stop him, and the woman turns. Her eyes widen with realization, flicking between Eli and the man, and she stumbles back.

                “Charlie?” the man says, a lifetime of regret in a single word.

                “I-I remember,” the woman gasps, and Julie Farkas comes up with a hand on her arm and an alarmed look shot at the two men. Eli steps forward. The answers have never been so close, and he hadn't known until now that he wanted them. 

                “I thought-I thought I killed you,” the man says, and he reaches out to her but Charlie just backs up behind Julie and Eli thinks, _what happened_?

                “Well, you can keep thinking that, Jack Novak. You may as well have. I forgot my son because of the bullet you put in my head,” she spits, venom in her voice as her spine straightens, and damn if it doesn’t sound familiar.

                _It ain’t like you’ve got a family history of getting shot in the head,_ Doc Mitchell had told him, and Eli’s starting to think that the good doctor was wrong.

                Arcade comes over then, and Eli wonders how many more people are going to witness this little reunion, but when the doctor puts his hand on his shoulder it feels like a weight was lifted off. Maybe he isn’t as alone as he thought he was, and that’s just something else that makes him feel like New Canaan is calling.

                Jack doesn’t answer and Eli steps between them, Arcade sticking close behind like he’s ready to intervene.

                “Do either of you want to tell me what in the hell is going on?” he asks, his voice low and flinty and he’d learned a long time ago it usually got him what he wanted.

                Charlie looks back up at him, and there’s something infinitely sad and infinitely patient in her face. She steps out from behind Julie and reaches for him, but he leans away and she drops her hand with a look of pain.

                “You’re my son. My baby. Oh, sweetheart, I’m so sorry I didn’t go back for you,” she says, and there are tears glimmering in her eyes and Eli turns back to look at Jack with a question in his eyes.

                Jack only shrugs his shoulders, arms held up. There’s anger and bitterness and sadness and regret all tangled up in his face and Eli wonders if he would have turned out so different after all if he’d stayed.

                “It’s true. Your dad ain’t nothing but a fucking addict,” Jack says, and that lifetime of pain is back in his voice.

                Eli bites back a sob, and Arcade reaches out and takes his hand, and Eli finds he can’t hold it back anymore. “Why didn’t you come back for me?” he asks, and he’s never been so vulnerable in his life, not even when he was standing in the smoking rubble of the Divide with two wedding rings in his pocket.

                Jack closes his eyes, and Eli thinks he might be crying too. “She told me you were dead,” he says, finally, and Eli knows he means Charlie. Jack wraps his arms around his middle and takes a deep breath. When he opens his eyes, they are clear. “If I had known…If I had known you weren’t, I’d have torn the world apart until I found you,” he says, and it’s one of those times when Eli just knows he’s telling the truth.

                He closes his eyes and he can see Jack, twenty-something years ago with a dead wife and a dead child and he’s sick of history repeating itself. He takes a deep breath and looks up at Arcade, wiping his eyes angrily.

                “Take care of him,” he says, fishing out a handful of caps and pressing it into his friend's hand. He leaves without another word, but this time he turns his steps back to the Vegas strip.

* * *

                Eli doesn’t say anything when he walks into the Lucky 38. The cold air hits him and he realizes it feels like coming home, and goddamn but he doesn’t think he can survive losing another one. He falls on Benny with kisses that are all tongue and teeth and desperation.

                Benny kisses back. He always does.

                They fuck for hours, the frantic pace slowing into something soft and gentle because dammit Eli just wants to be held for the first time in his life. Benny doesn’t say anything, just kisses him easy until Eli feels like he isn’t going to fall apart.

                Somewhere in there, he tells Benny he’s going to leave in between kisses. Benny just tells him he’ll be waiting for him to come back, and Eli stays until Benny falls asleep and he can see the Vegas sunset through the windows.

                Eli doesn’t stay. He never does.

* * *

                He stops by the Old Mormon Fort before he leaves. Isn’t sure why this is a wound he wants to pick at, but Charlie’s nowhere in sight and Arcade just nods to a tent.

                Eli steps inside, and Jack is stretched out asleep. He’s tall, too, legs hanging off the cot, and Eli thinks that must be where he gets it from.

                His shirt had been discarded in the heat of the day, and Arcade had laid out clean clothes for him, but Eli’s not the only one with tattoos.

                There’s a name in a heart on Jack’s chest that reads _Charlie_. There’s a name on his wrist, _Eli_ , with a date, _10.26.2256_.

* * *

                When he walks out of the Freeside gate, Eli doesn’t turn to look over his shoulder.

                He knows his feet will always lead him back.


End file.
